The Witcher 3 is a game in a painfully long list of games that give you the ability to activate a special vision that allows the player to see the important objects and details in the environment. In the rise of more detailed and varied environments in the later years of 3D graphics game designers had to figure out a way to let the player know where to go and what to do next. One of the earliest games I can think on that used this special vision is the original Assassin's Creed, in which "eagle vision" is used to view enemies in red and the objects and specific targets that the player had to get to are in gold. This game uses eagle vision to give the less observant player a way to keep an eye on the target in a crowd from very far away. Then Batman: Arkham Asylum used its "detective vision" to allow the player to see breakable walls, see when enemies have guns, see through walls, and see nearly every intractable object in the environment. Arkham Asylum nearly felt like it was built around the use of detective vision, it was the players largest foothold against the criminals of Gotham. Then The Witcher 3 came along and gave you its own twist on the old super eyes, witcher sense. Witcher sense lets you see everything, footprints, usable objects, enemies, dead enemies, fake walls, real walls, levers, switches, and even lootable chest. I don't really consider this a bad thing, the game has to have a way to parse its complex environments so that a human that doesn't have 200 hours to become a true detective can have a compete experience. Not that anyone with less than 100 hours would be completing it otherwise.

There is one point in the game that the witcher sense doesn't help the player like it usually does, a quest that requires you to kill an immortal werewolf. The only way to remove the werewolf permanently is to give it a certain item after defeating it in battle. The only problem is the game requires you to read one of the books given to you to figure this out. Now don't get me wrong, the problem isn't that the game wanted me to delve a little deeper into the its systems to solve the problem, it's that this is the only instance that make you do this. For every hunt that the player goes on the monster has a set of weaknesses that make the hunt much easier when exploited. This is always fun because this system is explained to the player early on and from that point on it makes sense to always use these weaknesses against the monsters. The game is breaking rules it didn't even mean to create. I looked up the solution for this quest and felt like an idiot when someone said the solution was simple the game was just "handholding" less. I later thought more on how the game isn't really holding your hand at all with the witcher sense but merely providing a shortcut into seeing what truly is part of the game and what is window dressing. If there was no witcher sense the player would be constantly running around hoping for "take item" prompts appearing above every box and crate, it would be madness. Witcher sense allows for people without a 1080p or higher screen to easily see the small footprints spread across the vast fields of wheat and rock. The game isn't holding your hand, its just letting you feel like a witcher.

The Last Of Us had another super vision ability that allows the player to see enemies making noise through walls. I went back to The Last Of Us recently on grounded mode which removes the ability to "listen", but instead of just using my television's speakers, I used a high quality pair of earmuff headphones to hear absorb the sound around me. This led to a large amount of palm sweat and eyelid peeling while I was creeping past the zombies and raiders. I was able to make it though without the listen ability because the headphones allowed for real life listening. That sounds a little ridiculous when I type it out but that's how it felt. The listen ability in The Last of Us is to sound, the Witcher 3's witcher sense is to vision.

Some games work without any sort of "handholding" or extended tutorials, like Spelunky. Spelunky teaches you the basic controls and forces you to complete the tutorial and then it throws you into the deep end. There is an entire secret set of levels that is only accessible after completing a pretty abstract set of objectives that in the end really make sense when you think about them. Explaining those objectives in Spelunky sounds like something you would do in a video game that Uncle Joey would be playing on Fullhouse. But I'm getting off of the topic at hand. These triple A games need to have assistant systems to give the mass market they need to reach to be successful the ability to complete the them and see the huge swath of content they have created. Besides, all the systems are technically optional anyway, right?

Survival horror games need a face lift. When I say survival horror games I'm not talking about Dead Space or Resident Evil, more in line with games like Outlast, Amnesia, or more recently Alien: Isolation. While both types of survival horror games suffer from this problem the more action oriented games give you interesting ways to deal with you adversaries allowing the game to fall back on these mechanics when the game loses its scary edge. In these, I guess I could call them "stealth", survival horror games you basically have two options, hide or die horribly. In the beginning of these games there is a pretty decent chunk of time where the player is surrounded by the games atmosphere to get them ready for a big scare or first contact with the games monster. This first hour or two supplies some of the most tense time I've ever spent in a game, I am coming to grips with my surroundings, imagining what horrors could be lurking around every corner, and just waiting for the game to throw its first punch. Then, finally, it happens and my heart starts pounding out of my chest, my muscles tense up, and I "scream" if I'm being kind to myself, it's more of a whimper really.

At this point I have either been frozen by fear and killed or I'm running for my life. Regardless of the outcome, maybe some of column A and B, afterwards I have made it out of the encounter and I want another peak at the beast, I need another look. So I walk around peaking around corners until I finally see it and its taking its walk around the level looking for me I guess and slowly but surely my fear fades away and never comes back. I know what the monster looks like and my imagination will never be able to conjure up anything worse. On top of all that, just like any other game I am progressively becoming more effective with dealing with any given situation and getting a feel for the distances at which things happen and the peripheral vision of the monster. These works are handicapped by the very medium for which they were made.

The length is a large factor that hampers the scare factor of many of these experiences. Outlast is 5 hours, which isn't too long, Amnesia is 8 which is stretching it, and Alien: Isolation is a whooping 19 hours. All of them lose their scariness only a couple hours into the game. There are only so many times that I can hear the music pick up and know that things are gonna get rough. Only so many times I can watch my character meet their demise until I start to laugh and start thinking of the most ridiculous way I can creep past these baddies. In Amnesia I created a special strut that consisted of walking forward with cycling between both lean keys while I avoided the monster as if to prove to the monster I don't care. I know that many would say that I am not immersing myself enough in the world but I feel like the game should be able to grab me and pull me in, which it does but only as long as a regular horror film would.

Some games have solutions that work for the most part for these problem like throughout Outlast the game throws different monsters at you with different personalities giving you new opportunists to imagine what they will do once they catch up. I know Amnesia also has different bad guys but they are all basically the same fleshy husk with different heads. P.T. is another game that uses a short run time to give me one of the strongest scares in my life and then after that initial scare, the game just piles on the pure weirdness that silent hill and Kojima himself are known.

My dream scenario for a stealth survival horror game would be a game that, whenever the player reaches a state of failure they are thrust into another environment that is completely alien to the previous and they are given an even more gruesome creature to encounter. When the player successfully completes an objective the game will analyze the world they made it through and avoid similar themes and try to really give the player something they can never truly adapt to. Or maybe even a game that supplies the player a variety of ways to manipulate the monster similar to Alien Isolation, but with a ridiculous amount of options, like a metal gear solid 3 of horror games.

Stealth horror games have so much more potential in them than I feel like developers are realizing. For such a popular genre, especially in the youtube and streaming space, to be almost wholly ignored by the AAA games industry as of late is a disappointment. I can't wait for Until Dawn even though it looks like a terrible horror movie I feel like it could somehow pull it off simply because of the novelty of being a game. And of course SOMA is gonna kill me later this year.

Today I started playing Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker for the Wii U and I am having a great time so far. Exploring and finding hidden junk is one of my favorite things to do in games when they are hiding in fun ways. Captain Toad is all about hiding stuff in interesting places. Its a real blast figuring out each and every puzzle and searching the map for ways to grab those eyeballed diamonds (dieballs?) and the best part is, the game wants the player to soak in the environments and really get a lay of the land. In another Nintendo game, Mario 3D World, the gamplay is honestly pretty similar except you are able to move around a lot faster and move vertically all on your very own. The design nearly maps 1:1 with Captain Toad. Of course Mario is getting more power ups and jumping around but he is just as much of a hoarder as Captain Toad, but Toad takes his sweet time while Mario is frantically running against the clock to find those worthless green "stars".

That was my one gripe with 3D World, on one hand the game has three green starts and one stamp on every level that you have to collect to see all the game has to offer (secret levels etc.) On the other hand the game wants you to get through the level under a time constraint for no other reason that I can figure out other than there were timers in the older games. The thing is though, Mario 64 changed everything. Mario 64 removed the timer in favor of absorbing your surroundings and choosing your own paths to get to the star. There are a bunch of shortcuts around each world that take some detective skills but are extremely rewarding to find. That's not to say finding the green stars in 3D World is boring but finding them and exploring the level under a time limit adds nothing to the game. In the 2D games a time limit works fine in a sense the art is mostly based off of a tile set and the music was only ever a 1-2 minute loop that was used multiple times per game. In the move to 3D the asset became view able from every angle and the music became bombastic orchestral tracks for the most part. The time limit just takes away what was so great about the previous 3D mario games. Doing a slow pan of your camera, hearing the oh so fitting music, and taking in the possibilities.

To be fair most levels in 3D World give you just enough time to grab all the collectibles and complete the level, but some of those green stars are hidden real deep in the bowels of those floating islands and I end up dying halfway through feeling like the game is fighting me and its own design. Nintendo all I want to do is savor your games like steak but you want me to chew it like slim jim. Let me savor you Nintendo...

Having a timer isn't always a bad thing though, timers work well for challenge levels like in Mario Galaxy and even on that one flag chasing level of 3D World. Timers work fantastically when the designer wants the player to kick it into gear when making as escape or waiting for rescue. Watching a clock tick down in situations like that can really get the players heart racing when used effectively. This is the same reason I believe we don't need the timer in Mario games anymore, this isn't the arcade, players don't need to be rushed through games for no reason anymore Nintendo.

The more I play Captain Toad the more I realize the vestigial nature of ever looming countdown clock inside of Mario games. The timer not only fights the 3D World the game but goes against the happy go lucky nature of Mario himself.